Lap Dog Eric Alterman:  Barack Obama Was Too Cool for the Press Room.  The president’s insistence on thinking before acting drove the media around the bend... and toward Donald Trump.

Angry Professor Eric Alterman reports:

 Our 44th president was the coolest guy in the room. It didn’t matter what room. He was always able to keep his head while everyone around him was losing theirs—and usually blaming him. Remember that viral meme from 2008, when it briefly seemed like John McCain might win? Everyone chill the f**k out, I got this, it read in block letters over a photo of Obama. Years later, after being lectured endlessly by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama abruptly cut him off. “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.” That’s cool.

Yes, he made mistakes, especially in his belated willingness to face up to the mendacity of his opposition. Even so, Obama has proved himself the most consequential liberal president since Franklin Roosevelt. It’s not only passing health-care reform, saving the economy and the auto industry, and rationalizing relations with Cuba and Iran. It’s that he did so while leaving the country with a 4.6 percent unemployment rate, a 3.9 percent wage-growth rate, and one of the longest-lasting economic expansions on record. Then there’s the tone he set. As a rhetorician, he was a peer to FDR and John F. Kennedy. As an executive, he presided over eight years without a hint of genuine scandal.

Eric Alterman: a fan of less than 3% GDP growth who claims no real scandals from the Obama regime. Imagine that.